This one is filled with… well, all sorts of stuff. We’re getting into the territory where the changelogs are hard to sum up. It’s a huge collection of small things, rather than a midsize collection of big things.

Oh, by the way — I don’t think we’ve announced this yet, so I will take this chance to now. Valley 2 is going to be going to 1.0 on Monday the 18th. So we’re really getting down there now!

Key stuff in this release:

* Lots of sound effects work. The tier 1 mage classes are now finalized, and many of the other mage classes have large portions of final bits to them. Some more of the monsters now have that, too, but largely I’ve not started on the monsters yet.

* A good dozen or so monsters have been rebalanced in various ways, based on our first monster balance thread. Another one (focused on this version and beyond) has now been created. I sense the start of a trend, like our “Worst Unit Of All Time” poll in the AI War subforums.

* There’s new strategic stuff, like the ability to skip the tutorial bits at the start, and the ability to undo moves of your NPCs if they didn’t fight or do a few select other things. Also some balance shifts on the strategy side, and it now shows you the perk token counts on each region.

* Oh, yeah — the way buildings are handled in a lot of the more annoying regions is a lot better now. Now they shouldn’t be “the more annoying regions” anymore. All in all the time to exploit a given region, and flip back and forth between the strategy and adventure parts of the game, should be better balanced now. There are still bits that take longer — by design — but they are also a lot more rare comparably speaking.

* Oh, also fixed a number of bugs with various spells in multiplayer and solo. One of which was causing you to friendly-fire YOURSELF when you used debris field spells. But it’s all fair — the firewalker monster was friendly-firing himself, too, the poor guy. ;) All that stuff is now fixed, along with the usage of explosions and rockets and so forth in tight corners and against walls.

Big bunch of polish, in short. This is definitely a very satisfying part of the development cycle of any game or expansion, I have to say. More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game. If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you. When you launch the game, you’ll see the notice of the update having been found if you’re connected to the Internet at the time. If you don’t have the standalone game, you can download that here. If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

About Arcen (Ar-ken) Games

Originally known for our unusual and highly effective approach to RTS artificial intelligence in our debut title AI War: Fleet Command, we have since branched out into many other genres and styles of games.

As you can tell by browsing our catalog of titles, our interests are eclectic, and we have a particular affinity for blurring the lines between unlikely genres.